Those in sales and marketing will attest that today’s B2B markets are all about timing. Currently, acquiring a lead or losing a prospective customer might depend on how quickly you reply to interested leads. Don’t forget that any chance wasted to move a lead farther into the funnel is lost potential income. As such, it is necessary to ensure that your marketing and sales teams are on the same page.
Marketing Qualified Leads or MQLs are a bridge between the sales and marketing teams. Most of the time, the sales team depends on the MQLs to successfully do their job. However, in most B2B businesses sales teams rarely get enough MQLs, and this is a puzzling phenomenon affecting many businesses today.
In this article, we will highlight the 4 crucial reasons why your sales team is running short on MQLs and costing your business significant revenue.
Why Your Sales Team Is Not Getting Enough MQLs
If you notice that your sales aren’t generating enough leads, this may be a sign that the definitions of leads used by your sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned. Here are four causes for your sales team’s lack of MQLs:1. No Segmentation
If you don’t segment your audience from the start, you’ll have difficulty attracting more MQLs. You may even find it difficult to convert leads from a potential to a qualified sales opportunity if your content isn’t sufficiently personalized to a lead’s industry, persona, etc. You want to ensure that your message is heard by those most likely to become clients. And your material must appeal to them for this to happen.2. No Mid-Stage Nurture
Most engagements with MQLs should be handled by marketing until they are poised to go down the sales funnel and become SQLs. However, this is not the case in most companies. You’ll be setting yourself up for disappointment if you assume that your sales staff will undertake all responsibility for nurturing a prospect. The truth is that your sales representatives lack marketing expertise.
In some cases, after a lead is passed on to sales, marketing teams frequently stop communicating with prospects altogether. You risk two things if marketing efforts are not sustained throughout the whole sales cycle. If the lead results in a sale, marketing won’t receive the credit, and a solid lead could be overlooked if a sales representative’s tenure is shorter than the purchase cycle.
3. Giving up Too Soon
Many businesses connect with prospects for a set amount of time, assuming that fresh leads should be cultivated until they become qualified. If it doesn’t, they should drop those leads, and more should be created. This often leads to significant marketing investment waste, especially given the hefty amounts paid to acquire the lead.
Only 8% of salespeople touch a prospect more than four times, even though 80% of prospects require more than four touches to close. You may pave the path to a successful follow-up with a more thorough approach to lead nurturing, which also helps to reduce resistance from the sales team.
Forrester Research reports that businesses that follow up with leads see a 50% increase in revenue at a 33% reduced cost. In other words, a better possibility of conversion results from more marketing touches during the MQL stage compared to fewer sales touches.
4. Mix Up Your Offer Strategy
SaaS firms frequently provide information that is difficult to comprehend, unactionable, confusing, and not focused on the prospects’ objectives. Even worse, it’s frequently improved to compete with others. You may believe that since your rival has published a 30-page booklet, you should as well. Or you invest time and money into creating a webinar that the customer doesn’t find particularly interesting.
You must recognize client concerns and provide answers to persuade a prospect to progress from MQL to trial or demo. Find out their issue, then reflect or reframe it for them.
Outsource to the experts
It’s easy for marketing teams to find the proper firms but much tougher to determine when a lead represents an opportunity worth sharing with sales. Growth depends on understanding what qualities a sales winnable lead must have and at what stage of the funnel.
Hiring a B2B SaaS marketing agency is the best option if you’re having trouble developing a long-term demand generation plan to produce high-quality leads and increase your ROI. If this sounds like you, we’d love to help. Contact our team of specialists for advice on how to align your sales and marketing goals.
